MARVEL’S AGENTS OF SHIELD, ABC Tuesday nights at 8 PM, deals with the team of non-superpowered folks who assist, investigate and otherwise deal with things pertaining to superheroes in the universe of THE AVENGERS. The series, created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, brings back Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), somehow resurrected – we don’t know quite how yet, but it’s clear Coulson himself has been misled – after his death in AVENGERS as the team leader. Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) is the most experienced agent after Coulson, Ward (Brett Dalton) is muscle, Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and …Read On »

Long before he wrote “Howl,” helped found the Beat movement and became one of the most venerated poets – and gay activists – of the twentieth century, Allen Ginsberg entered Columbia Collegein 1944. There he met Lucien Carr, who introduced Ginsberg to William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Carr’s old mentor David Kammerer. The relationship between Carr and Kammerer became so fraught that it ended in tragedy, which in turn presented an enormous moral conundrum for Ginsberg. This true – but until now largely unknown – story has been brought to the screen in KILL YOUR DARLINGS, directed by John …Read On »

DirecTV’s thriller series ROGUE, which concludes its first season Wednesday May 29, stars Thandie Newton as former Oakland police detective Grace Travis. Grace returns to her secret identity, minus her badge to investigate the death of her son. Marton Csokas plays Jimmy Laszlo, Grace’s lover and possible nemesis, who runs a shipping business that has a shady side. Csokas was born in New Zealand, holds a Hungarian passport and currently resides in the United States. Worldwide audiences know him as the elf Celeborn in the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Other recent credits include ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, DREAM HOUSE, …Read On »

In MONDAY MORNINGS, TNT Mondays at 10 PM, Alfred Molina’s character plays Dr. Harding Hooten, who is in charge of the weekly Mortality and Morbidity meetings, where the hows and whys of patient deaths are discussed. The series has been adapted by David E. Kelley from Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s book, with both men producing. Molina has been a TV series regular before, most recently in LAW & ORDER: LOS ANGELES. He’s also known for multiple feature film appearances, including Satipo in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and Dr. Otto Octavius in SPIDER-MAN 2. He’s been on Broadway three times, earning …Read On »

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is currently playing in theatres, and this new version of the web-head is unlike any we seen before. Director Marc Webb re-booted the popular Sony Pictures franchise with a more modern take on everyone’s favorite wall crawler now played by Andrew Garfield, and introduced audience to a host of familiar and new characters. ASSIGNMENT X spoke with Jerome Chen the Sr. Visual Effects Supervisor on the film, and even though the Lizard is the current villain, we couldn’t help but wonder what might be next for the web-headed wonder. Chen gave us a very specific place in …Read On »

Rating: PG-13 Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, Stellan Skarsgard, Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow Writer: Joss Whedon, story by Zak Penn and Joss Whedon Director: Joss Whedon Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures Release Date (U.S.): May 4, 2012 THE AVENGERS is spectacular in several senses of the word. It is literally a spectacle, with people flying up into the sky, monsters plummeting out of it, airships flying through it and so on. However, the real dynamism here is in the character interactions, not something one expects …Read On »

The vampires on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, now in its third season Thursdays at 8 PM on the CW, have a lot to write about in their journals, particularly when it comes to their family relationships. From the start, we’ve had the complicated sibling relationship between Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder), both in love with the mortal Elena (Nina Dobrev). Last season, we met Daniel Gillies as Elijah, one of the Original vampires, whose brother Klaus (Joseph Morgan) is a half-vampire/half-werewolf hybrid. This might not be so bad if Klaus hadn’t killed the rest of the family and now keeps …Read On »

Sometimes the best thing about going to the movies is seeing the movie trailers. Other times … not so much. Here are five movie previews that I watched so you don’t have to. THE SMURFS From the director of BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE and SCOOBY-DOO is another movie that will make you make you wish you were never born. This movie looks so smurfin’ bad. I would rather eat a smurfin’ gun than see it. Neil Patrick Harris deserves better than this. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN OK, I’m not going to lie to you, dear readers. I am going to see this …Read On »

This one is a kind of a no-brainer, but for anyone wondering if the Spider-Man character would ever appear in a future THE AVENGERS team-up movie, don’t hold your breath. First of all, even though Marvel (and now Disney) owns the character, it’s currently licensed to Sony Pictures, which makes it harder to extract him for a movie at another studio. However, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN producer Avi Arad at a press event during Comic-Con 2011 says there’s another reason for not putting him a big movie like that either. “There’s the team-ups [in the comics] that keep the publishing going, …Read On »